Resource management systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, are employed to gather and manage information from the multiple different verticals of an organization. A business user of a resource management system typically needs to create reports based on data from the resource management system. These reports are highly personalized depending on an object of the report and a personal liking of the business user and are therefore not pre-configured in the standard resource management system. Traditional report generation techniques involve manually generating reports by extracting data from the resource management system. However, there are many challenges that make it difficult for the business or functional users to create reports in the resource management system using traditional report generation techniques.
For example, the manually generated reports may include errors as well as disastrously wrong interpretation of data. Additionally, it is time consuming to manually generate reports at regular intervals. Further, real-time report generation is not possible currently from a resource management system and specifically from an ERP based supply chain management (SCM) and planning system. Moreover, the reports are typically not available to the users via remote access and the users are therefore not able to view the reports as and when required. Thus, traditional report generation techniques are manual, error prone, tedious, and time consuming, and therefore inefficient. Moreover, in the present resource management systems no real-time reports are being generated.
In a business involving supply chain management, the resource management system executes background jobs or processes to carry out daily planning activities. For example, a background process may be developed to automate the planning and forecasting activity. In today's business scenarios, extracting accurate data (especially from a large database) for performing business analytics and for subsequent reporting is critical to the success of the business. Additionally, formulating demand plan, supply plan, or production plan based on such analytics and reports is critical to the success of the business. The techniques involved in generating these plans are very tedious and any wrong report will affect the company sales, thereby causing revenue loss and other technical issues such as surplus inventories, lag in lead time, wrong production and confirmations, and so forth. Hence, there is a need to report the status of the background jobs or processes for an operational date so as to ensure the business to carry out its daily planning activities.
It is therefore desirable to provide an improved report generation technique for resource management systems that addresses the issues stated above. It is also desirable to provide a technique to closely monitor background jobs and processes used in sales and operational planning and generate real-time reports for resource management systems and specifically for ERP based supply chain management (SCM) and planning systems.